NBC handling coverage adroitly / Restraint is among the pluses

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, February 12, 2002

So you want curling? NBC Sports has your curling, yesterday on sibling cable channel CNBC, and watch out for painful accidents. The agony of the feet is no laughing matter.

NBC has given viewers at least a little of everything so far, including events not more than three dozen people would watch without the magical imprimatur of the Olympic Games.

Would you scan the sports TV listings in the newspaper and cancel all your other plans to catch women's halfpipe snowboarding on ESPN2? You would not. But the Olympics? That's different.

I was hoping for an event suggested a few years ago by a caller to the Ralph Barbieri-Tom Tolbert show on KNBR (680 AM) -- involuntary luge. Maybe next time.

The tape-delayed coverage is an issue. Actually, two issues. First, there's the post-competition packaging of events for prime-time presentation across the country. NBC supposedly was going to be a devotee of live coverage from Salt Lake City, after its withering, daylong delays during the Summer Games in Sydney. But if there was a debate inside NBC, the packagers seem to have won.

It's not an indefensible approach. The packaging allows NBC to eliminate the superfluous, to frame its coverage in story lines -- the networks learned long ago that the way to attract a cross-section of viewers was to tailor the coverage into little dramas -- and to diversify its presentation without fear of missing something live.

The other tape-delay issue affects only the West Coast. Whatever is on the screen here was shown in the rest of the country 2 1/2 hours earlier. The extra delay kills suspense for West Coast viewers who knew before they got home Friday evening that the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" hockey team would be the final flame-bearers in the Opening Ceremony, or knew before it was televised that snowboarder Kelly Clark won the United States' first gold medal on Sunday.

Our double-delay also accounts for the wonderful phrase "live recording of a previous broadcast," a concept that's a brain tease. Kind of makes me think that while I'm sleeping, the living tapes stacked on my VCR shelf could be dancing, partying and raiding the fridge.

Together, the tape delays underscore what's long been obvious: Any Olympics is event television first, and sports second. If sports ruled, the Olympics would be live as the Super Bowl.

Even with the regret of foreknowledge, I am enjoying NBC's coverage. Because . . .

-- If a TV host is going to talk too much, the host might as well be Bob Costas. He's smart, he's lucid, he's quick and he would sooner be skinned alive than utter a smarmy sentence. When Katie Couric said, during the Opening Ceremony, that the free-spirited snowboarders "say they're here for the babes and the beer," Costas was right back atcha: "Good mission statement."

-- Speaking of the relative absence of smarmy, NBC drastically has reduced those maudlin profiles of athletes who've overcome everything from dismemberment to chronic hemorrhoids to reach the Olympics. One that could have turned saccharine didn't -- Sunday night's profile of downhill skier Bill Johnson, brain-damaged after a horrendous skiing fall a year ago.

-- The word "dream," which should be banished from the vocabulary of all broadcasters, is appearing at the clip of two or three times an hour, half that of previous Olympics. At this rate of reduction, it could disappear by the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

-- Inviting ABC's veteran Olympics point man, Jim McKay, to contribute to NBC's coverage is a classy move. The years have taken most of the snap from McKay. But for millions of American viewers, he's a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity.

-- We'll soon tire of all the repeated commercials, but for now I'm still getting chuckles out of Gateway's ski-jumping cow.

-- Jingoism is in check, even with the temptations stemming from Sept. 11. In Sydney and again in Salt Lake City, NBC has celebrated the accomplishments of American athletes without sledgehammer emphasis. Restraint is easier in the Winter Games, of course, because Americans don't dominate.

-- The men's downhill ski-race coverage was a rush. And by editing tape to superimpose one skier's run alongside another's, NBC shows viewers how precious milliseconds are lost.

-- There are, already, the ancillary characters who always materialize in the Olympics. Prawat Nagvajara, the cross-country skier from, ahem, Thailand. And the Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann, who virtually lost his tenuous command of the English language when he won a gold medal, and reverted to excited squawks.

"I don't know what he said, but I loved every word of it," NBC's Len Berman observed.

-- George W. Bush pinched his face into his best evildoer scowl when the Iranians -- or was it a lone Iranian? -- marched into the Opening Ceremony. Bush's Olympics adventure was only beginning. He ended up sitting in the middle of the U.S. team. When figure skater Sasha Cohen handed Bush her cell phone, he chatted with Cohen's mother.

"How great is that?" Costas gushed. Yes, gushed. Under his professionalism, there's still a bunch of boy in Bob.

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